Iceland: Land of Fire and Ice

Grab your coffee and settle in, you’ll find that there are many posts here about Iceland and you won’t want to miss a single one if you are planning a trip or simply need to escape your current day!

Iceland has been on my travel radar for a few years, but moving and lots of other trips kept pushing it off. Then I found direct flights from our current home in Orlando that were during “shoulder season” and I hit buy before we had a chance to rethink it.

“Shoulder season” in travel terms is that time right after/before peak travel where things are cheaper because the chance of bad weather (hot or cold) or other less than ideal conditions are possible.

Which means, yup it’s a bit of a chance…especially in Iceland as tours often stop on August 31st or by Sept 15th for many hikes to ensure you don’t wind up in the mountains after dark or in a wicked storm.As luck would have it we arrived on Sept 12th and enjoyed amazing weather for the entire week, which leads to one of your most popular questions!

What’s the weather like?Iceland is warmer than you think with an oceanic climate that means mild winters, which reminds me a great deal of visiting the coastline of Alaska. 2°C in January {35°F}, however it can be very windy.

While we were there the temperature during the day was always above 50, so at times during our hike we were down to short sleeves…then if the wind picked up, often over 20MPH, while walking around town you’d find us on the same day with winter coats, gloves and hats!

Icelanders love to say they have more daylight than in Florida. If you average it out over the year, this is indeed true. The days were certainly longer in Iceland than when we returned home as the summer of the midnight sun was just beginning to taper off.

Icelandic FoodIf food is a concern for you, no worries. We actually realized it was hard to find serious Icelandic dishes unless you were doing upscale dining, in which case they were often serving PUFFIN.

I don’t know about you, but this little guy is too damn cute for me to eat!! Unfortunately due to being there in shoulder season we were too late for any of the tours out to see the puffins and whales in action. They had already started their migration to Antarctica.

In town there was pizza, Italian, Pakistani, Chinese, lots of burger joints. Seriously, it took some work to find one cafe serving nothing but Icelandic “traditional food”.Every morning we were treated to a large buffet at the Radison Blu and then a great little selection at Treasures B&B. The normal is fresh baked bread, nut butter, fresh meat slices, cheese slices, cucumber, avocado, tomato, granola, and Skyer (their yogurt). Rye bread, rye pancakes (which are used for little sandwiches with butter and smoked lamb or salmon), dried fish, meat is smoked or salted (used to be necessary to make it through winters), butter everywhere, ridiculous amounts of black licorice, milk chocolate and yes the two combined in to chocolate covered black licorice.

I tried one such candy {come on this sweet tooth had to know} and it was a bit like a rolo gone bad. Love the flavors, but not together.

Most veggies are grown in greenhouses, lots of tomatoes, cucumbers and bell peppers,
Smoothies were all over the airport, but then harder to find. Though the line for Dunkin donuts was always the longest and huge inside. So bizarre with all of the amazing bakeries right there! We wanted to eat at them all…if only we’d hiked a smidge more.

Delicacies that we did not part take in or really see much of: ram testicales, blood and liver pudding, singed sheep heads.

Water
It really doesn’t get much purer than water straight from the mountains. As our guide said, here you pay for 1 bottle of water and then refill it any place you please because the water is the purest in the world.

Tasted like heave to me!

But there is a very clear distinction between hot and cold here!

The sulphur is what causes the stinky egg smell and is what they use for creating over 99% of all the power in Iceland! Yup they are totally geothermal powered! However, you should NEVER use hot water for cooking or drinking unless you like the rotten egg smell.

Fun FactsLanguage: Couldn’t pronounce if if I wanted to, that’s how I felt about nearly everything in Icelandic and our tour guide was quick to point out that things aren’t phonetic, so most of us do it wrong.

No worries, everyone speaks English!

Horses: Small nordic horses are considered pure breed because they have no need to introduce other lines and have been around for hundreds of years.

They look like ponies, at least to someone my height or taller, because their back only rises to about my waist. Their colors vary from rich chestnut to goose grey, always with these manes you want to braid and a friendly personality. I still wish we had taken a ride, but David does have a few non-negotiables when we travel. Half the population lives in Reykjavik and if you look at population maps it’s a blast to see that beyond that there are only about 10 “cities” which have 200-5000 people and after that it’s towns of 200 or less.

People love their campers. Every where we went there were this little campers which you could rent and made the perfect place for hikers to spend the night and then get up and continue scrambling, up, over and around the beauty of this country. Lots of graffiti around the city, which just seems to be part of the artwork at times and well a little bit crude at others. None the less it made walking around interesting all the time!Packing Tips:Seriously these are the biggest things I wish we’d had or were glad to have had!!